I initially had a WD10EADS, which was pretty loud. Added a Samsung HD204UI, which is much quieter. I didn't see a review for the WD10EADS, but did see one for the WD--EACS. Looks like the newer generation of WD drives is much quieter? Plus, Samsung drives are no longer Samsung made since they are owned by Seagate now? What are users' preferred choice nowadays? Not looking to purchase a WD Red until they get more back in stock.

For ultimate silence, perhaps you could consider a quiet 2,5" drive coupled with a Scythe Quiet Drive 2,5. This could even be further suspended if needed. The following link is for a very quiet 500 GB WD Scorpio Blue (Editor's Choice award at SPCR)

Thanks. Are WD20EARS models discontinued? They are at least hard to find. All I see for good deals are EARX models, which are four-platter models. EDIT: actually there seems to be both three and four platter models of the EARX drive...

Hi, I have a WD green WD20EARX and it's pretty quiet, when soft mounted at least. This is 5400rpm (ish) 2TB SATA III drive and seems to be readily available.Some of the recent Hitachi drives have received favourable SPCR reviews recently and should be available to buy easily too.

I initially had a WD10EADS, which was pretty loud. Added a Samsung HD204UI, which is much quieter. I didn't see a review for the WD10EADS, but did see one for the WD--EACS. Looks like the newer generation of WD drives is much quieter? Plus, Samsung drives are no longer Samsung made since they are owned by Seagate now? What are users' preferred choice nowadays? Not looking to purchase a WD Red until they get more back in stock.

Do not get a Seagate "Samsung F4". It is sooo loud. click click click...

I will be using 2.5" drives in my desktop only (when I get around to reinstalling Win7, that is).I use Toshiba drives, 5K 1TB 9.5mm (because I got them on sale), I avoid WD because of the head park issue (likely only an issue for dual boot with Linux/Win).I still have one older 500GB 5K Samsung disk and it is the loudest component in my system, when the CPU fan is below 800RPM.

"It's upped the platter capacity to 750GB and rotation speed to 6600rpm over the previous model."

I definitely want a 5400 model. The Hitachi Deskstar 5K3000 is 5940RPM. The Seagate Barracuda Green sports a 5900 motor. So that leaves only the WD ones and Samsung F4 EcoGreen. The EcoGreen recording has a reasonably pleasant sound (to me) but loud seeks, the WD Red 3TB is pretty loud in comparison (I think) but the 1TB again has a nice character, so 2TB would be in between.

But WD Red has this "time-limited error recovery" that, according to the review, "is almost essential for RAID configurations to avoid data loss when errors are encountered". It is not really essential to avoid data loss, it is essential to avoid a disk being dropped by the RAID array under high I/O load when errors are encountered [article]. The downside is that such disks cannot be used in non-RAID environments. I don't really understand how a disk can stop responding for a full 8 seconds while not crashing the system, but maybe it just stops responding to controller commands, I don't know. So the Red drives can only be used in RAID configs where there is redundancy in the form of a RAID 1 mirror, or RAID 5 parity - it seems - because otherwise the disk might postpone error correction causing sector reads to fail. But only under high load.

The EcoGreen recording has a reasonably pleasant sound (to me) but loud seeks, the WD Red 3TB is pretty loud in comparison (I think) but the 1TB again has a nice character, so 2TB would be in between.

My 3TB Red is the quietest drive I've ever had. When I was setting it up I had it in one of those "toaster" external docks and I couldn't believe it was running because it was so quiet. I had to get my ear within a foot to get a whooshing sound. Never noticed seek noise. It completely disappeared once inside my case. YMMV.

xen wrote:

But WD Red has this "time-limited error recovery" .... The downside is that such disks cannot be used in non-RAID environments.

I was worried about this as well. I think we had a short discussion on it in the thread for the recent SPCR article on the Red drives. Conclusion was that TLER would probably not be noticeable in a desktop (non-RAID) environment. I bought mine based on this and have had no problems so far. I use it in my desktop PC as my mass storage drive (SSD runs the OS). Works great, but I've only had it a few weeks.

I would think so too - that the Red drive would give no problems in desktop. I just read that thread. Makes sense. The worst thing that can happen is that a sector goes bad a little faster than usual and your application gets an I/O error. Perhaps this results in a sector lost and a file corrupt. Most likely it would have happened anyway.

I would think so too - that the Red drive would give no problems in desktop. I just read that thread. Makes sense. The worst thing that can happen is that a sector goes bad a little faster than usual and your application gets an I/O error. Perhaps this results in a sector lost and a file corrupt. Most likely it would have happened anyway.

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